How Sense is providing award-winning support to its Care Managers

At Sense, we recognise the importance of supporting our registered care managers. Their role is absolutely critical for providing high quality support services and enabling the people we support to achieve outcomes.

Registered care managers set the culture and quality for the services they manage – from the recruitment and support of person centred teams through to their focus on continuous improvement and development of their services. However, we should not underestimate the demands and pressure of the role. They will frequently be juggling many competing demands and requests, both within the service but also from families, commissioners and care managers, and from head office. How do they fit it all into their working day?

For this reason, we were thrilled to be awarded the Skills for Care Accolade in recognition of our commitment to providing excellent support to our registered care managers. Through our leadership development programme, our Quality Framework and support throughout the registration and inspection process, Sense is seen as championing the role of registered care managers and the role they have in delivering effective and responsive support.

After completing the nomination, our verification visit with Skills for Care was a great opportunity to recognise and reflect on both the tangible and intangible benefits that our work can have on improving outcomes for people and facilitating some of those ‘wow’ moments in their everyday lives.

We were able to recognise and celebrate innovation and the achievements of our staff and the people we support, such as supporting successful transitions for people to move into their own homes, through good communication, confidence building and careful planning. We also shared some of the creative and engaging way people’s daily lives and progress are being recorded, such as one individual having a chalkboard painted on his bedroom wall to record all of the things that are important to him, with a photograph taken at the end of the day as a record.

We were thrilled to be shortlisted and invited to attend the Accolades Awards Ceremony. It’s not every day that we are invited to dress in black tie and get to meet Samia Ghadie from Coronation Street who was hosting the event (a bonus for me being a lifelong Coronation Street viewer). We were delighted when Sense was declared the winner of the Accolade on the night. It was wonderful to have our work recognised in such an exciting and unique way. The event itself was a great opportunity to hear about the opportunities and challenges for the sector from some of the main influencers in social care, including Andrea Sutcliffe, the Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care for the Care Quality Commission.

We saw the Accolade as a testimony to working in a co-ordinated and collegiate approach across our operational services, Learning and Development and Quality teams to give the very best support to our managers. We are always evolving and developing the approach to supporting our staff and it is critical to focus on continuous improvement to avoid complacency – we are always thinking about what’s next and how can we do it better?

We have been able to showcase Sense as leaders in good practice, how we value and support our people and how we are working towards being an employer of choice – we think that is something worth celebrating.